


Glasses

by Zofiia



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Crusades, Death, Gen, Genocide, Mentions the following, Murder, Violent Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-02
Updated: 2020-07-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:01:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25035136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zofiia/pseuds/Zofiia
Summary: Estonia never realized how poor his eyesight really was - until a friend of his gifted him a pair of glasses. He is elated by the chance to see the world for what it really is, but quickly realizes that some things are better left unseen.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 5





	Glasses

Estonia sat silently at the foot of his bed, staring at a thin wooden box with a note attached. Due to it being so late in the evening, he was not able to read the writing, though even if it had been midday, he might not have been able to read it. He could just barely make out the fine, but blocky, shapes of the letters. 

He didn't sit long and wonder what the note said, however, as he was quite curious as to what the box's contents were. He unlatched the simple copper clasp that held it shut, and inside he found something he had scarcely seen before. 

He had seen people wear these from time to time, but those people belonged to a higher class than he did. He'd never met another person of his status that wore them, and he had certainly never seen another nation wear them. Carefully, he picked up the glasses by the thin iron framing. He unfolded the temples to examine them further, but since the light had greatly lessened in the past five minutes, he couldn't gather more about their appearance. Finally, he held them up and slipped them onto his face.

In an instant, everything was different. Things he had seen thousands of times looked much different than they did before. He took the glasses off and looked around again, and he did the same after putting them back on. He couldn't believe what he was seeing.

Everything was sharper. When he took the glasses off, anything more than a foot away from him was blurry, and if someone were to hold up a hand and ask him how many fingers they were holding up, he would have said eight. 

"Is this why Rīga was taking measurements of my face? What a queer thing to do to someone," Estonia muttered to himself as he slipped the glasses on and off. 

A few months prior, a good friend of Estonia’s, named Rīga, had noticed something about him. She saw that he often did not notice the same things she did, that he looked over many of the things she did not. After Estonia collided with a small child, she began asking him pointed questions about what he could and could not see. After a bit of a back and forth, she came to the conclusion that he had poor eyesight.

Estonia had never really thought about that, though. His entire life up to that point was spent running and hiding in dark or forgotten places. He did not wonder if his eyes worked as they should. He never even considered that something might be wrong with them because he had nothing to compare it with. Rīga wore glasses as well, though, so he supposed that she must know what she was talking about. 

Unfortunately, as meticulous as Rīga had been with her measurements, the glasses still didn't fit him as well as they could. They slipped down the bridge of his nose no matter how hard he tried to keep them in place. This wouldn’t be an issue, though, as Estonia was confident that - given time and an opportunity - he would be able to shape the glasses to fit his face.

But even though the glasses did not fit him right now, he decided it would be a waste to not test them out before he slept. If he tried to go to bed, his curiosity would eat him away until dawn. He wouldn't be able to sleep if he didn't experiment at least a little bit.

So first he lit the shrinking candle on the corner of his desk. For a moment he was still. The room around him was simple and tidy - that much he already knew. Estonia kept his spaces as clean as he could. He didn’t like having things in his way. 

The wood of the room was pale, and in the corners were thick beams of yellow-tinted wood for support. Pine and birch, perhaps? He thought. The floor was simply dirt. When he lowered the candle to the floor, the dirt was tinted red-orange. Before, he hadn’t the ability to see the tint and assumed it was simply the normal brown hue. 

The bed was a simple, lopsided, straw-stuffed canvas. Of course, Estonia could gather all of this from touch, but what he’d not noticed before were the stains and discoloration. He could only assume that they had come from nights where he had been dragged back here in shambles, smeared with his own blood. Rīga and Latvia did all they could to assist him in wars and battles, but it was not always enough. Between the Teutonic Order to the west, Lithuania and Poland looming in the south, and Novgorod in the east, there was always fighting to be done. But he had never really seen the aftermath of it… Until now.

The largest of the stains nearly stretched the width of the bed. He knew exactly when that stain had appeared; he remembered that night clearly. The metallic stench of blood stuck in his mind, and the screaming of the innocent still rang in his ears. In vain, the dying and desperate screamed and begged the gods for protection. Mothers hid their children, fathers gave their lives to protect them, but to no avail. The Teutonic Knights, accompanied by Denmark, were swift and stopped at nothing to accomplish their task. When they decided to make an example of someone, they showed no mercy. Estonia did what he could to stand with and protect the people among whom he’d wandered for generations. But there was nothing he could do against them. He stood no chance. The blood that stained the bed was from that night. The Livonian Crusade would haunt him until the day he died, as would the violent, blood-splattered face of The Teutonic Order himself. It was he who inflicted such dire wounds on Estonia. 

Slowly, he turned his head away from the blotched canvas, to the other side of his room. His desk was made of cedar. He looked the piece up and down. It had been a ‘gift’ from the Teutonic Order himself after he captured both Latvia and Estonia himself and forced them into the Livonian Order. He remembered the pompousness in his bright red eyes, and the smugness in his crooked smile as he presented him with the thing. Of course, it wasn’t meant to be a gift at all. It was a marker - a symbol that he had lost his freedom, his friends, and his faith. The one beautiful thing he had ever owned would be an ever-present reminder of all the things that had been torn from him. He tried not to use it if he could help it. 

He carefully took the glasses off his face and placed them back in the box that Rīga had packed them in. He closed his eyes. Between the blood stains of the mattress and the desk, which looked as though it was streaked with old blood, Estonia felt sick. Every so often, he would be reminded of the carnage he endured at the hands of those larger and stronger than him. It would stick with him always.


End file.
